All Your Base are Belong to Google

Google Base: More Google goodness or another step towards world domination?

Article No :10 | December 15, 2005 | by Alex Schleifer

Because "giving away" one of the most powerful analytic applications away isn’t enough, Google is now out to take on Exchange (well, in a way). Google Base is potentially rather revolutionary. Not that an online, freeform database is something that hasn’t been attempted before but this is, after all, Google Base.

Google creating a free system to help catalog any type of data should rattle a few cages; if you think that the Google Maps API was exciting just think what a global, crowd maintained super database will let people do (especially with a more-than-certain accompanying API). So when the rattling stops, and the animals have settled down again we can start forgetting how the world was like when we didn’t feed every bit of information we had into Google.

I wonder how people would react if say Microsoft got there first. To be honest, I’m still surprised they consistently get in 2nd or 3rd but seeing that people would most definitely, well, freak out maybe it’s actually a brilliant way to go about it. See, you can let Google do all this "world domination" stuff under their warm & fuzzy, carebear, "they do it because they love us" image; then, when nobody’s looking do the same thing without getting too much heat.

interesting thoughts. it really is amazing people love and trust google so much. but how could you not when they give us all these amazing lifechanging softwares for free?! google earth itself is enough to warrant the affection, but the list goes on and on…

Indeed. And on and on and on… Haven’t you noticed that Google stuff is always easy to “sell” to otherwise technofobic family members? “Wow, it converts units?”—I guess that building great stuff pays off.

Who cares. Google thinks they’re the greatest, but the fortune does not always favor the bold. In the end they will their lesson. Something bad wil happen and the stocks will crash and then bye bye. Hopefully Microsoft will just swallow them and then it is over.

uhm, are all you ppl so anti-google?
I’ve not yet had my great dissapointments with google…
someone enlighten me what the hell you M$ ppl are talking about?
ASP better than PHP?
MSN search better than Google?
oh come on you guys must be kidding :/
and about that google-watch stuff:
some loser found his page didn’t rank high enough and suddenly the world’s best advertisement algorythm ain’t good enough?
>> www.google-watch-watch.org
jees you guys, you should all BURN of shame!
you’re missing the goal these engineers have at Google:
to change the world to a better place!
it’s called revolution and that’s what M$ hasn’t been about for a long time, if you are dumb enough to use IE, you might even know that…
ah heck,I’ll give it a rest, your minds are set on MS and that ain’t gonna change because MS is all about conservativity, which is one of the worse attitudes you can have towards ICT and all things related to it.

I think it’s important not to be too one-sided here. The article was more about the people’s perception of Google vs that of Microsoft. I for one don’t particularily believe that neither Microsoft nor Google are particularily “evil” or “good”, especially not the engineers. I’m more partial to PHP but that’s NOT because ASP is from Microsoft. I use Google for web-searches but I prefer Microsoft’s desktop search. We have Linux and Microsoft servers, work on Linux and Microsoft workstations (and soon, Apple.) There’s no reason being pro or anti anything, we need to maintain a degree of vigilance and skeptisism.

I think those at Google are some of the best designers. They’ve taken notice of things on the web that needed attention and have gone way, way above and beyond to increase productivity, entertainment, useability, and interaction. They certainly work for the people. Incredible!